Social Media & Musicians – The Way Forward…

Although a useful tool in its day its seems Myspace has got itself stuck between being a weak competitor to Facebook and a promotional service for bands that falls short of doing much more than being a cumbersome scrolling billboard for other peoples music.

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With so many new and upcoming social media tools that they can make use of its no surprise that bands and artists no longer rely upon Myspace as a means of serious promotion. In this article I will address how musicians can reach out to their audiences and what the future holds for those willing to get experimental and creative with their music promotion.

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What’s out there right now?

Twitter

Naturally Twitter is a great means of sharing short, sharp bursts of information about what’s going on and linking to other media such as blogs, pictures or videos – not to mention some witty banter or incendiary comments. Surprisingly however a lot of research points to the fact that teenagers, who are more likely to benefit from it when promoting their bands, are just not really that into Twitter – perhaps because its not as social as services like Facebook or Bebo.

Indaba to offer CD production services

According to a recent entry on their blog Indaba are offering a CD manufacturing service to their premium customers.

The service, which recently relaunced with a new set of artist friendly features such as integration with iTunes will allow you to distribute your CD releases directly to your fans. For more info click here

Making Music: Online collaboration tools

I’ve seen a fair few posts on web forums recently discussing online collaboration and the best methods currently available to music producers, so I thought it might be worthwhile sharing some of the experiences and knowledge I’ve picked up over the past few months regarding this subject.

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Whilst direct DAW to DAW collaboration is still something in the pipeline, hopefully the first true example being Ohm Force’s forthcoming Ohm Studio solution  there are still a couple of tools and services available that allow easy collaboration via the web.

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All of the below are free tools, although they do offer additional features such as increased storage space and promotional tools through paid subscription packages –

Dropbox

Apart from being one of the most useful tools I’ve come across for general computing in the past year or so, Dropbox is also a relatively easy and direct means of sharing DAW project files, WAV files and any other data relevant to your music production and composition.

Making Music – Recording & Editing with Indaba’s “Mantis” online DAW

Indaba Music, who first came on the scene in 2007 have grown into strong online music community and one of the first to offer a cloud based DAW – “Mantis” that could allowed users to record and collaborate on tracks. I decided to put this tool to the test to see how its features lived up to existing recording applications and what it offered to studio musicians and producers looking to work online and collaborate with other artists. In this first part of my feature I’m going to take a look at Mantis and cover the recording and editing of a basic track.

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New version of Indaba on its way…

Indaba Music have announced today that some changes are on their way. Not being too specific at this time but hopefully this video will give us some clues as to what’s coming.

They have also created some guides to using their superb online DAW Mantis – these can be found here

I’ve being doing some recording on Mantis myself recently so expect an article soon on it…

Indaba Peter Gabriel remix competition – one week to go!

Indaba are currently running a competition to remix Peter Gabriel’s classic track “Games Without Frontiers”. Only a week left to go on it however so best get mixing people!

Entrants can use existing parts of the original track that Indaba have made available – I’ve had a look and can confirm there is certainly enough there to play with here.

The winner will be awarded by having their track mastered at Gabriel’s Real World Studios and released as a double A side with the original.

More details here